The launch of the new Simcity videogame failed

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The story of the videogame SimCity, the latest version of the successful series with the same name, which was to revive a glorious name in the field of videogames, has instead become synonymous with failure. The big problems suffered by players in the early days that followed the launch of the new Simcity showed that Maxis, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts that developed it, made various mistakes.

The new SimCity was released on March 5, 2013 in North America and in the subsequent days in the rest of the world but since the beginning the players who purchased it have faced major problems with the servers dedicated to the game. Many users who tried to buy Simcity online using the dedicated Electronic Arts service had problems downloading it from the server. The biggest problem was caused by the need of the game to have a persistent connection to the Internet which led to an overload on the servers.

Last year there was already some criticism towards Maxis and Electronic Arts because it was known that the new Simcity would contain a type of DRM protection system that required a persistent Internet connection to use the game. Maxis vice-president Lucy Bradshaw stated that many calculations are handled by the servers so the game can only work online.

However, after the major problems of server overload occurred after the release of the new Simcity, the site “Rock, Paper, Shotgun” published a statement from a source inside Maxis that denies Lucy Bradshaw’s claim and says that the servers don’t handle calculations needed to simulate the cities.

After a few days disastrous for the people who bought Simcity right when it was released, in an interview with the site “Polygon” Lucy Bradshaw apologized for the problems and promised the activation of other servers and changes that reduce the load on the servers. She also offered a videogame from the Electronic Arts portfolio as a gift to the damaged users as compensation for the inconvenience suffered. Thus we have to acknowledge that the company worked to solve the situation.

A service has been activated to allow players to know the situation of the servers so that you can choose to choose one that doesn’t suffer from overload. To gain access to a server indicated as full you need to have a city saved on it.

In the meantime, however, a user on Reddit proposed a mod that allows you to play offline, albeit with some minor limitations. This proves that actually the connection to the servers is required only for some limited operations. Therefore there’s a strong suspicion that in the end the factor that really matters is the DRM protection, confirming that it hurts honest buyers.

Apparently, the situation with the servers has much improved since the early days. I don’t have the new Simcity so I can only report the comments of those who bought it immediately, usually angry. Even if Maxis and Electronic Arts are fixing the problems, the damage to their reputation is significant. Hopefully this will be a lesson to other manufacturers.

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